1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to monitoring computer-based transactions, and more particularly, to monitoring events occurring on a network computer remote from a monitoring computer.
2. Background Information
In today's environment of networked computers, high speed communication connections, and a multitude of Internet resources, network users require ever shorter response times to increasingly complex online transactions. Today's network users demand almost instantaneous response to their queries, whether the requested transaction is a complex search on a multi-million line database or an online loan request that requires a credit check and verification against bank lending standards.
Users who experience what they consider unreasonably slow response times to their online queries are not likely to be satisfied with their use of a particular online transaction or web site and are less likely to return to the transaction or site, especially if alternate resources and sites are available. Correspondingly, online transaction developers are driven to streamline their transactions, not only to please their end users and encourage their return usage but also to minimize unnecessary overhead within each transaction, thousands of which may be occurring at any given moment. Transaction developers and developers of network components attempt to monitor the performance of their network transactions and components in actual usage to best determine whether their efforts toward efficiently streamlining their products have been effective.
Various techniques have been adopted in the past to monitor activities on computers, all with varying amounts of success. For example, Microsoft has developed Browser Helper Objects, which are a particular type of ActiveX® components, that can be adopted for monitoring purposes in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. (ActiveX® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Wash.). However, utilization of ActiveX® routines requires these executable routines be downloaded permanently onto a user's browser and further requires the user's affirmative response to a prompt requesting authorization to install the software. If the user declines, the activity of targeted web-based pages and transactions cannot be monitored, and the developer of such pages and transactions is limited regarding the amount of relevant data that can be recorded and evaluated to improve performance.
Developers have also coded and inserted monitoring applets within web pages to run on user browsers to monitor the performance of the browser while the pages are active on the browser. However, such applets generally can measure performance events only within the page in which the applet was embedded and therefore have limited value monitoring such browser-level events as navigating to a new page or page access aborts. Furthermore, because of limitations in browser technology, any data gleaned during these page applet-based monitoring functions can only be sent back to the web server originating the web page. Such a limitation imposes additional network communications load between the browser and the web server and adds processing load to the web server that must receive and somehow process the monitoring data. Additionally, should the web server go down or should the connection between the browser and the web server be lost following the download of the page to the browser, any monitoring data will likely be lost.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a system and method for monitoring specific, performance-related events on users' networked computers, wherein the monitoring can be accomplished without interfering with the actual user transactions and wherein the evaluation of the monitored events can be performed with minimal impact on the processing and the communications of the networked computers and wherein the system automatically effects changes to improve computer performance without user input.